Brand Behaving Badly: Stop Pretending To Be a Happ...

Recently I wrote a post about a social brand, and someone from corporate left a comment on the post trying to prove me wrong by pretending to be a happy customer of that brand, rather than an employee. For a brand that has spent a ton of time, energy and resources on building its brand and social cred, this is really, really, very, very bad, dirty brand behavior. In a word: Grrrrr.

If there’s anyone reading this that doesn’t understand why this is bad behavior, which I doubt, it is simply the antithesis of being a good social citizen. The opposite of transparent, a blatant misrepresentation. To a brand that goes to great lengths to differentiate on good brand behavior – how well it treats its customers – this is a very good way to very quickly kill trust. In all honesty, I was considering becoming a customer, and I don’t think I can do so now, even though I recognize this is one individual of many.

I have sent multiple e-mails to this individual, to no avail. I could out this person, possibly getting him reprimanded or fired, and possibly damaging the reputation of the brand. Thanks to a consultation with the more-cool-headed @augieray, and @danamlewis and @philgerb, I have opted to continue pursuing other channels of conversation to stop this behavior before trying to draw a lot of attention to this individual/brand.

Perhaps, if you add your voices to mine in the comments, I can send a link and a message to this individual and convince them to stop. Thanks for your help.

P.S. if you are wondering what the heck the photo is, that would be Astroturf. This poor practice is called Astroturfing, and I find it amusing that I didn’t even know that until it happened here. Ha. Sometimes I wonder what planet I live on.

P.P.S. a little tip for any astroturfers or would-be astroturfers out there. When you comment, we can see the IP address so we know that it came from your corporate .com

Dear Subaru storytelling campaign...

Saw this ad in Cooking Light yesterday and I dig that it is using customer stories to spread the love. I’m awaiting confirmation but I believe the campaign comes from Carmichael Lynch, an agency I was with for 5 years in the late 90s. Their philosophy was – and is – “Speak to the core and let others listen in.” Meaning they were enthusiast marketers before social enthusiast marketing was cool.

Whoever executed the campaign, I’ve got a few questions, though. Why is “Dear Subaru” buried in the corporate website, not promoted on the home page (say, in place of the Free Outback Detergent promo)? It’s great advertising IMHO, but why rely on that to get people there when you’ve probably got tons of prospects hitting your home page? Why isn’t the campaign integrated into your Facebook page? Your fans obviously love you, but what better place to capture more stories and/or refer them to “Dear Subaru”? Why, on the “Dear Subaru” page, can we only see the three stories that you have controlled for advertising purposes? Have there been other submissions? Are people participating? The page isn’t social/transparent for us users to really FEEL the love.

Awesome idea. And I think it’s pretty new, so maybe it will get there. But it feels like a digital campaign executed by an advertising agency.

A Realist’s Guide to Successful Social Strat...

Thank you to everyone who came to my presentation at the PRSA Social Media Summit at UW-Whitewater. It was a fun day with a lot of great speakers and attendees. I welcome your feedback on the presentation in the comments: What was most helpful? What could be better?

Social Storytelling: where is it all? And when doe...

I’ve been looking for examples of great storytelling in social media. There aren’t an abundance, it seems. I’ve asked some other, more prominent social media junkies, who haven’t been able to come up with much, either. I can point to Tom Martin’s excellent Mardi Gras Twitter experiment. And Danny Brown pointed me to this great story about Smith Family Farm. Personally, I think pure brand storytelling is one of the most underutilized social strategies.

It’s just one form of storytelling, but why don’t more brands share photos, videos, anecdotes, lifestreams, to give us an inside glimpse of what makes them tick, their cultures, their values? What better way to make a personal connection? Maybe because their cultures aren’t as engaging as they could be in the first place? : )

Zappos does a great job of this, generally. Their storytelling reflects one of their core values: create fun and a little weirdness.

When I first started on Twitter I saw a photo that @zapposCEO shared of the coffee machine in one of their buldings that has been rigged to look like Rosie on the Jetsons. It made an impression: “Fun, intelligent brand.”

Last week, in doing some research for a presentation, I also came across this more recent video of a prank that employees there were playing on each other, involving dropping a bunch of ping pong balls on other employees’ heads. Funny, sort of. But stupid funny. It, too, made an impression: “Are they paying any attention to my order?”

So I did more digging and learned from a great post from ReadWriteWeb that the Zappos site aggregates the tweets from all of the Zappos employees on Twitter. As the post pointed out, there are no tweets that say “drunk”; however, at the time I first viewed the aggregation, the first tweet in the stream was something about how too much Jagermeister was going to make for a bad morning the next day. This, I believe,  definitely falls in the “TMI” category. But I also understand that it’s an isolated tweet, and that overall the stream sends a positive message. It’s more “real” because of the imperfections and the fact that its not scrubbed corporate clean. They also aggregate non-employees’ tweets about Zappos – positive and negative – which takes serious guts and I applaud.

I’m a big fan of leaning towards more transparency. I’m not suggesting that employees should be heavily “censored” or edited. But even if you let the silly pranks fly, wouldn’t it be OK to simply ask employees to not tweet about drinking? As far as social media policies go, “Don’t tweet about getting wasted” seems pretty lenient. What is “fun” and what is “stupid fun” is highly subjective. Jagermeister is…Jagermeister. Don’t you want to be seen as fun AND professional and trustworthy?

My point? This type of transparent storytelling, while a great strategy, walks a fine line between “fun” and “too much fun, not enough business.” Quite honestly, I’m usually the first one saying that people take themselves too seriously; but I do think Zappos could create stories that better reinforce their brand of great customer service. There’s a difference between storytelling and strategic storytelling. I’m excited to see what Zappos will do next now that Mullen is their agency.

Have you seen any great social storytelling? When do you think social storytelling goes too far? Where’s the line?

Photo credits: Rosie from DYN on Flickr.

Seven tips for being a so-called change agent...

As someone who spent her late teens and twenties living in Wisconsin, California, Texas, South Carolina, Minnesota and New York, I’ve always been pretty able to adapt to change. Change excites me, in fact. Last week I started a new gig at a 42-year-old agency. Not surprisingly, not everyone is as welcoming of “the brave new world” of marketing as I may be, though there are definitely some major bright spots. I’m not alone in my passions, and that’s incredibly important.

Personally, in my sometimes idealistic little brain, I think an agency — any agency — should be filled with 100% individuals who have massive intellectual curiosity and embrace new ideas, new technologies, and new people. But that’s indeed idealistic and I try to brand myself as a realist. So, instead, I am – to use a friend’s terminology – cultivating a garden of patience. I am heeding my pre-gig horoscope which warned: “You will meet with resistance if you are too pushy and bold.” I don’t believe one can be too bold, per se, but one, especially this one, can be too pushy.

My new mantra: small victories. Someone fixing the broken link on the agency blog. New, more strategic content on the agency blog forthcoming. A few people agreeing to use Yammer to share news, articles, research between agency offices. While I might hope for more, being the change hog that I am, that’s not a bad first week. I’ll take it and I’ll happily come back for more.

It will be interesting to see if this degree of transparency – which I consider far from “radical” – raises any hackles. I should be clear, I am not representing that this agency is “broken” and I am the savior, by any stretch of the imagination. There were a lot of good things happening long before I came along. Before I was born, in fact, and I am no Spring chicken. But I will also transparently say that there is a need for people to breathe in new life from time to time, in any organization. And where is this more true than in an agency, where we are responsible for leading a wide variety of brands into said brave new world?

So from my first week, here are things I’ve become acutely aware that I will need to do to be an effective-and-not-annoying “new life breather”.

1. Cultivate patience. A bumper crop of it.

2. With patience comes persistence. Small victories every week over time will add up to big ones.

3. Have both “gentle” mode and “bold” mode. They each will have a time and a place.

4. Do your homework, always. The more “proof” you have for your positions, obviously, the more credibility you will establish for the next time you suggest a change.

5. Lead by example. This has always been a favorite and, in my opinion, is one of the most important strategies for any successful leader.

6. Identify and nurture your like-minded allies, the ones who can help you make things happen.

7. Be an energizer. This requires a “relentless focus on the positive”. In my new role, I am relentlessly working on this.

There, of course, are more. These are the ones that are top of mind for me right now. Tell me please, what are yours?

Photo credit: David King